page_title: Osceola
section_title: Relics
hierarchical_section_title: Osceola / Relics
caption_attribution_description: "OSCEOLA, A CHIEF OF THE SEMINOLE INDIANS. The most celebrated character in the Indian Wars of Florida. From a lithograph in McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America, Philadelphia. 1838."
context_page_description: Osceola, named Billy Powell at birth in Alabama, became an influential leader of the Seminole people in Florida. His mother was Creek, and his "great-grandfather was the redoubtable Scotsman, James McQueen.". He was reared by his mother in the Creek tradition. When he was a child, they migrated to Florida with other Red Stick refugees, "led by a half-breed relative, Peter McQueen", after their group's defeat in 1814 in the Creek Wars. There they became part of what was known as the Seminole people.
  In 1836, Osceola led a small group of warriors in the Seminole resistance during the Second Seminole War, when the United States tried to remove the tribe from their lands in Florida to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. He became an adviser to Micanopy, the principal chief of the Seminole from 1825 to 1849. Osceola led the Seminole resistance to removal until he was captured on October 21, 1837, by deception, under a flag of truce, when he went to a site near Fort Peyton for peace talks. The United States first imprisoned him at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, then transported him to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina.
context_section_description: According to the oral tradition of his descendants, Dr. Frederick Weedon was alone with the body and cut off Osceola's head, placing it in the coffin with the scarf that Osceola had customarily worn being wrapped around the neck, and immediately before the funeral ceremony removed the head and shut the coffin's lid. Weedon kept the head for himself, as well as other objects belonging to Osceola, including a brass pipe and a silver concho. Capt. Pitcairn Morrison, the U.S. Army officer in charge of the Seminole prisoners who had been transported with Osceola, made a last-minute decision to take other items belonging to Osceola. The historical evidence suggests that it was Morrison who decided that a death mask should be made, a European-American custom at the time for prominent persons, but it was done without the permission of Osceola's people. An acquaintance of Morrison, Dr. Benjamin Strobel, a native of Charleston, made a plaster cast of Osceola's face and upper torso. The process of "pulling" the first mold, which was soon displayed in the window of a Charleston drugstore, destroyed the original cast. Weedon apparently preserved Osceola's head in a large jar of alcohol and took it to St. Augustine, where he exhibited it in the family drugstore.
  Captain Pitcairn Morrison sent the death mask and some other objects collected by Weedon to an army officer in Washington. By 1885, the death mask and some of Osceola's belongings were being held in the anthropology collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The death mask is currently housed in the Luce collection of the New-York Historical Society. 
  In 1966, Miami businessman Otis W. Shriver claimed he had dug up Osceola's grave and put his bones into a bank vault to rebury them at a tourist site at the Rainbow Springs. Shriver traveled around the state in 1967 to gather support for his project. Archaeologists later proved that Shriver had dug up animal remains; Osceola's body was still in its coffin.
  In 1979 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma bought Osceola's bandolier and other personal items from a Sotheby's auction. Because of the chief's significance, over time some people have created forgeries of Osceola's belongings. Rumors persist that his embalmed head has been found in various locations.
caption: Osceola (1838 lithograph)
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